MELBOURNE, VIC — Jessica Pegula, Iga Swiatek and Coco Gauff are all breezing through the Australian Open's women's bracket so far.
The women’s upcoming fourth-round matches: Iga Swiatek vs. Elena Rybakina, Jessica Pegula vs. Barbora Krejcikova, Coco Gauff vs. Jelena Ostapenko, and Victoria Azarenka vs. Zhu Lin.
As well as Pegula is playing, dropping zero sets and just 11 games total along the way to Week 2, you might think she’d be completely pleased with how things are going.
Ah, but Pegula is a self-described perfectionist. And so she gave herself a bit of a hard time about what happened late in the second set of her 6-0, 6-2 victory over Marta Kostyuk.
“I was annoyed,” Pegula said after the 65-minute contest.
By what, exactly?
Well, the 28-year-old from New York was cruising along, having won 10 of the first 11 games and serving with a 30-love lead, when she stumbled ever so slightly, ever so briefly. She missed three first serves in a row. She put a backhand into the net. She got lobbed. She double-faulted. She started muttering under her breath. She sent a backhand long to end an 11-stroke exchange. Add it up, and Pegula got broken there, her lead in the second set shrinking to 4-2. For three minutes, her play was less than ideal.
Oh, the horror.
“When I was younger, it came off as kind of a bad attitude. I’d get really negative or down on myself,” Pegula said, adding that she has worked on “not being so hard on myself during the matches.”
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